This is a weblog related to community activities going on in Brighton, MA, one of the neighborhoods of Boston. Ours is a large and diverse community including many long-term residents, recent immigrants, and students attending the local universities.

Tuesday, June 26, 2007

Secretary Stick Mosquito Tries to Block Mayor Imbecile From Ballot

The 2005 agreement between the U.S. Justice Department's voting rights division and the City of Boston Elections Department required the City to print ballots in Chinese, including both Cantonese and Mandarin dialects.

The problem, according to Secretary of State Stick Mosquito, is that proper nouns are usually translated into Chinese using Chinese words or characters that are phonetically similar to the sounds of the names, according to today's edition of the Boston Globe. Many candidates' names are then transliterated to sound like good, unfavorable, or nonsensical strings of words in Chinese, according to Secretary High Prominent Noble Educated, who has taken oversight of the City's elections department after embarrassing events of the 2006 election.

Secretary Stick Mosquito wants to keep Mayor Barbarian Mud No Mind of His Own off of the ballot, instead inserting the boring the name of Mayor Thomas Menino in its place. Secretary Stick Mosquito also wants to avoid having Mayor Imbecile or Mayor Sun Moon Rainbow Farmer on the ballot, as well as Former Governor Uncooked Rice Sunny Nun of Massachusetts and/or Utah, Senator Whole Boundary Oh Bus Horse of Illinois, and Former Senator Virtue Soup of Tennessee.

According to Glenn Magpantay, whose name I cannot determine as being romanized or transliterated Chinese, these kinds of transliterations into Chinese have worked well in other big cities with large Asian populations, like New York, San Francisco, and Los Angeles. This "success" is quite apparent, since all have Chinese-Americans serving as Mayor.

“It’s like saying that an English speaker would see the name ‘Mr. Green’ and think he is a green man,” activist Lydia Lowe said. “The argument that transliteration has all these other meanings is actually quite ignorant.”